What do you do when you’re the Minister for Northern Australia, your government’s landmark “Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility” is known only for its failure to fund any infrastructure, and one of the nation’s pre-eminent research organisations releases reports showing how uneconomic building new infrastructure in remote locations is?
If you’re Matt Canavan, attack inner-city avocado eaters.
Last week, the CSIRO released its Northern Australia Water Resource Assessment, three reports looking at the Mitchell catchment in far north Queensland, the Fitzroy catchment in Western Australia and the Darwin catchment in the Northern Territory. The reports were spun by Canavan and his party leader, paving the way for major new dam investment.
“Investing in dams is one of the key ways we can make our country more resilient from drought,” Canavan said. “If we had had the Pinnacles dam there right now, they would be growing sorghum cotton seed and molasses that could be trucked to these drought-affected areas in Queensland to provide relief.” He added “these reports have been conducted by the pre-eminent scientific body in our country, the CSIRO”. His party leader, who is also infrastructure minister, joined in on “the potential for 387,000ha of crops such as cotton and sugarcane”.
Canavan decided to go further, anticipating critics of dam-building. “They will pontificate from the salons of West End about the evils of irrigated agriculture in between mouthfuls of smashed avocado … they know nothing about farming, even though they still want to eat the best produce all year round.” The Courier-Mail — which referred to a dam producing “$720,000 million in farm produce”, more than 10 times the actual entire Australian agricultural output — described this as “challenging hippies”, yet again demonstrating News Corp editors are old white men whose frame of cultural reference was frozen in 1978.
But you’ll never pick it: the CSIRO reports actually detail how frighteningly uneconomic building dams in northern Australia are. Take its conclusions in the Mitchell catchment report: “Viable new irrigation development in the Mitchell catchment would require challenging combinations of low-cost infrastructure, high-productivity farms, management of a wide range of risks, and/or off-farm value adding.” The CSIRO warns of “the systematic tendency of proponents of large infrastructure projects to substantially under estimate development costs” and concludes “even when technically feasible options are found, many of these are unlikely to be profitable at the returns and over time periods expected by many investors. The results presented below suggest that development costs above $15,000/ha (plus $7424/ha farm setup costs) would be difficult to cover from farm gate revenues alone.” You could add other uses, such as food and fibre processing, to the mix but that would also increase risk along with potentially increasing revenue.
The CSIRO goes on to note “scheme development costs for the most promising potential dam sites in this Assessment were estimated at about $20,000/ha to $30,000/ha”.
It’s a similar story for the Fitzroy catchment. So similar, the CSIRO cut and pasted pretty much the entire economic analysis. “Viable new irrigation development in the Fitzroy catchment would require challenging combinations of low-cost infrastructure, high-productivity farms, management of a wide range of risks, and/or off-farm value adding.” Ditto the Darwin catchment. “Viable new irrigation development in the Darwin catchments would require challenging combinations of low-cost infrastructure, high-productivity farms, management of a wide range of risks, and/or off-farm value adding” although the numbers there were a little different: “scheme development costs for the most promising potential dam sites in this Assessment were estimated at about $18,000/ha to $25,000/ha.”
But it was the same conclusion for all three catchments: “On this basis, farm gate revenues alone would fall short of reaching a 7% return on capital invested.” And all that’s assuming construction and operational costs don’t blow out.
You don’t have to be an avo-munching hipster to find these dams objectionable. You merely have to be able to count.
The nationals in Qld have been prattling on about tapping Nth Qld rivers since Bjelke-Petersen days – while it is might be a justified emotive response for rural folk not to waste water, they just aren’t apparently very good at mathematics, engineering, or reason.
What Cavanagh is also telling us with this little outburst is that, far from slinking away, the right factional power brokers in Canberra are still determined to push us further to the right, and will keep needling away with their anti environment protection, anti PC sentiments.
These are the same people who tried to insist on funding East West Link despite a business case that showed 45 cents on the dollar. Who let Barnaby Joyce move a government agency to his own electorate, uprooting the lives of its employees, without a cost-benefit analysis of ny type.
The idea that they’re the “better economic managers” is a sick joke played on this country.
It’s funny how Coal boy thinks city folk actually give a damn if there’s dams or not. I promise that regardless of what they had for breakfast or brunch – and why are they so obsessed with what others have for breakfast? – no one was talking down dams.
Why pretend there’s opposition to it other than the economics?
The opposition is more likely to come from people who will be forced out of thei properties by dams.
There I was, lounging in my West End salon, digesting the avocado with grilled cheese luncheon treat and about to pontificate on the evils of irrigated agriculture, when Matt Canavan saved me – in the nick of time – from being a cliche. And he is right: I know nothing about farming. Nevertheless I am not sufficiently ignorant to accept The Courier-Mail’s interpretation of a CSIRO report over the report itself.
I was in the West End Saloon, when the Cotton Eye Joe, Coal Younger, Murray Darling and Cousin Jethro canavan rolled into town. Looked like they were aimin’ to rob the bank, again. What an irritating aggro-cultured lot they were. But they robbed Murray Darling at the poker table, then Jethro shot himself in the foot, Cotton Eye Joe took to the gin and Coal Younger went off in a puff of smoke.
So I went back to my panel beating – I still had half a car door to bash into shape.
(That’s the Nat’s “King” Coal Younger of course)
I was also in West End, avocado munching. But I do know about farming – 40 years of experience – and Matt is a goose. Pity. A close friend is a relative of Matt’s and says he’s not a bad goose, but he only has one wing (guess). No amount of irrigation with grow left-side wings on geese
I personally don’t mind a good dam, especially given that we might be screaming out for water in most parts of the country in future.
I’d like to see it piped down to flood the Murray Darling. Sure it’s uneconomic, sure the numbers don’t add up, sure it would change the local environments all the way down.
But the benefits in terms of saving the Murray Darling and having enough water to allow thieves, oops, irrigators, to legitimately save their farms might be worth the angst. And what’s more, perhaps they could pay for it. Not all of it of course, but a portion.
We could then provide attractive and fairly reliable living and employment opportunities west of the great divide, and people could leave Sydney and Melbourne to a viable alternative.
And then the government could neglect infrastructure and cancel projects in Sydney and Melbourne, and we could go through the cycle of shitty government and dilapidated infrastructure all over again.
I can’t see a downside.
Yes, I am talking out of my arse, but I suspect water is going to become a big issue sooner rather than later, and maybe we will start thinking of things that seem outrageous now.
But you’d be safe in thinking that anything that comes out of Canavan’s, ummm, mouth, doesn’t carry a lot of thought behind it.